Poetry lends itself to all occasions, happy and sad, everyday and rare. It offers a multitude of forms -- the exquisite slenderness of a haiku, the sprawling pages of an epic, the rigor of a sonnet, the bouncing rhyme, the grace of free verse -- but every word is the result of a careful choice.

Poets writing in response to Hurricane Katrina and the flood in New Orleans have risen to that terrible muse in virtually every way imaginable -- some with humor, most with deep seriousness, all with a sense of responsibility. From the 2006 benefit anthology "Hurricane Blues," edited by Philip C. Kolin and Susan Swartwout, to impassioned small-press efforts such as "Katrina-Ku," published by the New Orleans Haiku Society in 2006, to Dave Brinks' "Caveat Onus," an intricate, three-part epic published over several months in 2006, the waves of poetry are still hitting this shore.

Martha Serpas, author of "The Dirty Side of the Storm" and a professor at the University of Tampa, is the author of three poems that appeared in The New Yorker's Katrina issue. But she wrote those poems -- and all except for one in her book -- before the storm.

Growing up in Galliano, then taking students to see the wetlands, Serpas always knew about coastal erosion, and the vanishing Louisiana landscape is one of her great subjects.

"People asked me, 'How did you write those poems so quickly?' And I'd say, 'I didn't.' It felt extremely strange to be getting attention because of this horrible thing, and I had to struggle with that," Serpas said. "And then I started to feel OK. The poems deal with erosion and disappearing land and loss of home -- that's really part of the Katrina story, and an important part for people elsewhere to understand so there can be some movement toward change.

"People knew such a flood was inevitable, and yet, when it actually happened, it was also that shocking, immediate experience.

"Cajun culture is very present tense. Hey, we stopped by right now, now we're going to sit down and whatever we're doing we're putting off. That's part of the difficulty of this situation. For so long it was so hard for anybody to accept.

"I'm still overwhelmed by it and it will be a while before I'll be able to do anything again."

"The only poem I wrote afterward was 'Poem Found,'" Serpas said. "That was the only immediate eruption that got a poem on the page. I'm not really stunned, it's more like it's something sacred. It's cataclysmic. I feel a mixture of true awe -- wonder and fear -- and I just can't say anything about it yet. But I'm interested in those soon to come and the coming outpouring."

Don't miss this fine collection, which comes accompanied by a CD of performances by the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars, featuring special guests such as Harry Shearer and John Boutte. That spooky, mystical klezmer music is perfect for these poems, such acerbic and witty portraits of post-Katrina life. Codrescu is marvelously situated to appreciate loss of home, and oh, the ironies! In "Looting wal-mart," he recalls "how quickly they forgot how they didn't want a Wal-mart here, but now that they've looted wal-mart, we want the national guard here."

There are poems on other themes as well. In the section called "Some Poets," Codrescu honors his forebears -- Tolstoy, Tristan Tzara, Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg among them. Always witty and wise, Codrescu writes poetry that is authentic and wonderful. His voice is so familiar, yet he always has something new to say.

Gabriel Gomez, who now lives in Santa Fe, N.M., has taught at Tulane University and the University of New Orleans. The title poem of this collection is a 28-day record of days between Katrina and Rita, which draws from the news headlines, the language tossed around by politicians, and realistic images of the storm to provide a portrait of just how dislocating, how jarring, how out of time that period was.

Gomez won the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize for this book.

BLOOD DAZZLER By Patricia Smith (Coffee House Press, $16)

Patricia Smith, who lives in New York, presents a carefully imagined New Orleans in this fierce and moving book. Full of anger and spice and wit, she conjures a series of eight "Voodoo" poems/spells; a heartbreaking series devoted to the fate of a 9th Ward dog named Luther B, left tied to a cypress; and the savagely wonderful "What to Tweak," "Michael Brown" and "The President Flies Over."

She honors the memory of Ethel Freeman, who died in her wheelchair outside the Convention Center, in "Ethel's Sestina" and "Didn't Need No Music Either," and takes us inside the mind of a transsexual in "Ms. Thang Sloshes in the Direction of Home."

But plain and simple, she gets it. She creates a dialogue from our stormy history, with Betsy chastising Katrina for overkill in "Siblings." But most of all, in "Only Everything I Own," an ordinary person looks at her prize possessions, the simple things of daily life that we love: "The tiny pine table is my whole kitchen,/daddy's legacy, my certain warm nurture. I dream loud in this house." Her fury is all ours, and it is something to see, a match for any storm.

COLOSSEUM By Katie Ford (Graywolf Press, $15)

In this collection, Katie Ford explores the ruins of architecture and civilization and personal life, the sure and certain fate of all who live. These ruins have their own allure, of course, whether they came to fall through war or weather or time itself. And the sense of loss is a great human bond, whether we walk in the Colosseum of Rome, or place a bouquet at the Coliseum Theatre in New Orleans.

In the title poem, Ford shows us our essential solitude in the face of pain and loss: "How great is the darkness in which we grope,/ William James said, not speaking of the earth, but the mind/ split into its caves and plinth from which to watch/its one great fight." These poems are stately and gorgeous, connecting the great sweep of history, and how we are left to rebuild over time, time and time again.

SALTWATER EMPIRE By Raymond McDaniel (Coffee House Press, $16)

Raymond McDaniel's poems exploit the rich classical mythology of Mardi Gras and the metaphors of voodoo, to call up the rulers of this "Saltwater Empire" we all share.

But the take-home from this collection is definitely the series of poems called "Convention Centers of the New World," which give voice to ordinary folk wise to the way of the world, and plainspoken. One speaker says, "I come from all over New Orleans. What I feel needs to be said/ about this is that everything was done wrong."

GREEN ZONE IN NEW ORLEANS By Mark Yakich (Press Street, $10)

Loyola University professor Mark Yakich, also the author of "Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross" and "The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine," has created a poem for nine voices in "Green Zone in New Orleans." It begins with our common experience: "Forgive me, Home -- I have to go and can't take you with!" And carries on to the risky nature of life today: "Together/We'll jump from the back of one/ Dark horse to the next."

This attractive chapbook is illustrated with Yakich's witty line drawings.

THE DIRTY SIDE OF THE STORM By Martha Serpas (W.W. Norton, $13.95 paperback reprint)

Martha Serpas, also the author of "Cote Blanche," travels the landscape of south Louisiana in this fine collection, elegiac and profound. These poems prefigure Katrina, with the exception of "Poem Found," which Serpas has read at various memorial services since the storm.

These poems are rich in cultural context, as well as lush imagery of our fragile natural world. And Serpas, in "Ordinary Times," knows how to make images that echo: "Rain sounds like rain anywhere,/ a deluge in Chauvin is a deluge in Bangladesh./A bare foot in a swollen ditch." But the underlying faith of these poems is strong and sustaining.

-- Susan Larson

Andrei Codrescu, author of "Jealous Witness," said, "I'm normally against writing about catastrophe, personal or collective. It took me a year to write about 9/11.

"In this case, I wrote in the heat of the events because the Klezmer Allstars needed some material. They were scattered all over after the storm and the poems were written for them to make music from. I felt a great deal of emotion and wrote them in a kind of trance. When I was finished, I was reading them to these people, and I started tearing up like a lot of people.

"I don't recommend writing about traumatic events so close to them. You need a distance, you know, and a decent moment of silence to absorb it and think about it. In this case, it was doing something for some other people who wanted to work on a project, so I felt I wasn't alone in doing it."

One poem seems eerily prophetic: "Before the Storm: Geographers in New Orleans," in which Codrescu writes, "Imaginary geography is still the prime mover... this particular imagination is reshaping our world/ making it necessary to re-envision its mapping according to desire."

"That was an interesting coincidence," Codrescu said. "It includes a reflection on the history of New Orleans' long series of geological and manmade catastrophes. From the very beginning, there was this idea that the conventional geography can't really tell the story of a place like this, which changes all the time and changes very radically. That turned out to be pretty prophetic, accurate in that the storm came and just took its place in a series of events that changes the geography in New Orleans.

"I've just been attracted to places that had some kind of impending rupture," said Codrescu, a Romanian immigrant. "I left my country and my language when I was 19 years old. For a lot of people older than me, that was a catastrophe. For me it was an opportunity. I got to be born again and start from the beginning."

Katie Ford, who now lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Franklin and Marshall University, was teaching at Loyola University when Katrina arrived. She already had been at work on the poems in her new collection, "Colosseum," having written the first ones in 2000 and 2001.

"At first I was simply looking at ancient ruins and civilizations -- Pompeii and Rome and Florence," said Ford, who traveled to Italy on a grant from the university. "And obviously New Orleans became the modern example. I just felt kind of overwhelmed by the storm. It became my whole mental and emotional landscape."

Ford and her husband, novelist Josh Emmons, left New Orleans in 2006, but return when they can. "Everything just seemed too risky and stressful to us," she said. "But it's good to come back for happy events. It's nice to see people you're close to, yet it still feels palpable, how much pain they're in. It's still one thing after another.

"When something so traumatic has happened, you worry that the art won't seem true, that you'll seem opportunistic, that you're sentimentalizing something. I tried to work very hard against the sentiment.

"The last poem I wrote was called 'Snakes,' and it's the only poem that mentions New Orleans by name. I was asked to do a poem alongside a museum piece, basically a prehistoric tool, and dug up by archaeologists. It made me think about what will last and what won't, made me think of what people would find of New Orleans if it were dug up hundreds of years later," Ford said. "And I fixed on that image of an ax in an attic, thinking of what makes us live in New Orleans, how we died, how we might be found."

For New York poet Patricia Smith, author of "Blood Dazzler," writing about Katrina began with the poem "34," in which she imagined the voices of those who died in St. Rita's Nursing Home.

"I wanted to write a poem that gave those people their voices back," she said.

Reading it in public often made her audiences uncomfortable; finally, at a reading in Florida, a woman said to Smith, "Well, they had Mardi Gras, didn't they?" It was then, she said, "I realized that there were a lot of people who wanted it to be over and filed away, who would look at CNN and see somebody nailing up a bit of bright wood or throwing beads and say, 'New Orleans is all right.'"

Smith, who is currently working with the Urban Bush Women on a performance piece based on "Blood Dazzler," said, "Whenever there's been a story that's affected as many people as Katrina, I've tried to place myself in that story, and I've had arguments with myself about that. Someone might ask me how can you truly write about that experience if you weren't part of it? And that slowed me down for a while. But three-quarters of my poems wouldn't be written if I had to be there and actually go through it.

"I think that if you're African-American, you were placed there in another way," Smith said. "There is always the chance, no matter what you're going though, you will be abandoned to deal with it on your own. There's another level in which black people were involved -- and you didn't have to be there -- and you realized that that kind of abandonment was highly possible no matter what you were."

Smith compulsively clipped news stories and drew on networks of writers for her information, especially the writing of Times-Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry, a fellow member of the prestigious African-American poetry workshop, Cave Canem.

"He was there the whole time," Smith said, "sort of translating for us, saying, 'This is probably what you saw and heard today; this is what I'm seeing. So you don't get fooled, let me tell you what it's really like.'"

"I try to step into the story and try on all the shoes in the story until those shoes get really uncomfortable," Smith said. "You're responding to a human situation; it becomes a universal thing. I'm not trying to have the correct credentials for writing this book. I'm not from New Orleans, but it's good if you think I am."